"We had a photograph on our piano . . . "

We had a photograph on our piano, in the sunroom in the front of our apartment on the North Side of Chicago.  The sunroom had little black and white mosaic tiles on the floor, like in the bathroom, and windows all around.

The piano took up the entire sunroom. . . . They said my mother used to play. 

I didn't like to look at that photograph. . . . 

It shows a sweet, half-turned, slightly out-of-focus face.

She's almost smiling in the picture, but she wasn't smiling at me.    

She left.  She vanished.  She didn't say goodbye. 

I didn't want to be reminded.

I didn’t like to go into the sunroom, with the grand piano and the photograph and the dust motes dancing in the shafts of light. 

The dust motes, feathery, loft and drift.  In the darkness the dust motes vanish, you cannot see them.       

You don’t think about them when you can’t see them.  Maybe they don’t exist.  Like the music that used to come out of the piano.  I don’t mean the sheet music, which was stuffed inside the piano bench, under the flip-top seat.  Later, someone gave it away.

I couldn't remember the music.  Had I heard it?

What I had known I could no longer be sure of.  What had felt real now seemed a dream.

She was gone. Had she ever been?